Moving Companies and Pay-Per-Click Advertising Are a Winning Combination

Moving Companies and Pay-Per-Click Advertising Are a Winning Combination

If you counted all the times that you click on your laptop’s trackpad, the touchscreen of your smartphone or tablet, and the occasional old school mouse on a desktop computer, the thought alone would send you to Dr. Google to ask about symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome.  Conventional wisdom goes that clicks are cheap; for example, the number of people who donate money to charities is much less than those who click to share social media posts about humanitarian causes.  Meanwhile, in the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, clicks are so valuable that small businesses pay for them, and perhaps your moving company should, too.  PPC advertising is an effective way for local businesses to reach their target audience.  It takes practice to make PPC advertising lucrative, though, so if you are just starting out with this aspect of digital marketing, it is best to do so with the help of the WordPress developers and digital marketers at High Converting Media.

What Do You Have to Gain by Paying for Clicks?

When a user types a search term into Google, the search engine uses its algorithm to find the sites that are most likely to answer the user’s question or grant the user’s request.  Making your site rank first is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization (SEO).  Even if you win the game of SEO, though, your site is still not the very first thing that users will see.  For commercial searches, such as when a user is searching for a type of business (such as “affordable movers near me”), one or more display ads appear above the organic search results.

You might ask how those ads got there, and the answer is pay-per-click advertising.  Businesses bid on the most relevant search terms in order to have their ads display above the organic search results.  Your moving company would probably bid on search terms like “moving company Indianapolis” or “movers San Antonio,” and so would your competitors.  To determine which paid ad displays first, Google looks at how much each company agreed to pay for every time a user clicks on the display ad.  In other words, you pay for the ads by the click instead of by the view or simply for the length of time that Google continues to display them (which is what businesses do when they buy advertising space in a physical newspaper).

The PPC ad is not simply a shortcut to your full website, though.  Instead, it leads to a landing page that contains only a few hundred words of content, plus buttons for visitors to call you, email you, or fill out an online contact form.  Creating a successful landing page, with just the right content and just the right layout, is an important part of any PPC ad campaign.

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

PPC advertising does not take the place of SEO, and it also does not take the place of simply maintaining an informative website with a user-friendly interface.  In other words, PPC advertising is just one component of a complete digital marketing strategy.  Despite this, PPC is more important for moving companies than it is for ecommerce sites, where not all of their prospective customers are in the same geographic area, or restaurants, where the goal is to become users’ favorite restaurant so that they visit you frequently.  Most people hire movers less than once per year.

PPC novices can easily sink hundreds of hours into the trial and error required to get a return on investment on PPC advertising.  Not every search term is worth bidding on.  Likewise, since you are the one paying for clicks, you lose money if users click on your display ad but don’t convert into leads through your landing page by contacting you through one of its contact options.  The best way to get a return on investment on your PPC ads from the beginning is to hire an experienced online marketing company that knows what works as far as landing pages for moving companies.  The digital marketing professionals at High Converting Media can help you create a PPC ad campaign where clicks easily turn into paid gigs.